Group: Oil From Exxon Spill Lingers

About 10,000 gallons of crude oil is still buried under the shoreline where the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and continues to affect wildlife, a group of scientists said.

Jeff Short, a scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, surveyed the Prince William Sound spill area last summer to determine how much oil was still present.

He and other scientists released their findings Tuesday, the first of a four-day conference on the lingering effects of the spill, which released an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil.

"We did indeed find quite a lot more oil than we expected to see," Short said.

He added that most of the buried oil, scattered along more than four miles of shoreline, hasn't changed much chemically since it was spilled, and remains toxic.

Other studies documented problems among species that forage on the nearby sea floor.

Exposure to this oil may no longer threaten overall animal populations. But sea otters and harlequin ducks near oiled areas have been ingesting hydrocarbons and suffering liver and tissue damage, according to reports by biologists Brenda Ballachey of the U.S. Geological Survey and Dan Esler of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Otter and duck numbers in oiled areas have continued to decline, while populations in non-oiled bays fare much better, they said.

An Exxon Mobil official and a Maine chemist dismissed the idea that the spill still causes significant damage to life in the Sound.

"What science has learned in Alaska and elsewhere is that while oil spills can have acute short-term effects, the environment has remarkable powers of recovery," said company vice president Frank Sprow in a statement released from Exxon Mobil's headquarters in Irving, Texas.

Bowdoin College biochemist David Page, who has conducted studies for Exxon, said he was skeptical of Short's findings. Page said natural factors in Prince William Sound have been the major factor in governing ecological change.